Essay On Distributive And Integrative Power Strategy

The distributive and integrative strategies of power strategy will be discussed in this section. They are influenced by power and can easily indicated by the power distance of Hofstede (1980). In the following section, the effectiveness of these strategies will be evaluated at different cultures. Besides, interaction of different cultures for these two power strategies will also be discussed with recommendations.

Based on the literature, distributive strategy is a power strategy that focuses on individual, not joint, gains at the expense of the other and the size of the pie is fixed (Adair, et al., 2001; Pruitt, 1983; Pruitt, 1981). It is a normative strategy for high power distance, collectivistic and hierarchical culture, such as Turkey

Japan is a strong hierarchical country with a high power distance culture as the role and responsibility of leader and subordinate are clearly defined (March, 1990). Brett and Okumura (1998) illustrated that during their joint venture negotiation between the Japanese and American, Japanese negotiators were more likely to discuss how powerful their company was and how advantageous their negotiating position was by emphasizing more on position and status to establish the power differences. Besides, Sullivan and Peterson (1982) stated that distributive strategy may foster trust to reduce behavioral uncertainty because the Japanese is used to be guided with the collectivism value, which is the social norms that are framed by the society’s power and hierarchy (Smith, 1991; Lefebvre and Lefebvre, 1986). This is aligned with their national culture which is collectivism and uncertainty avoidance (Hofstede, 1980). Hence, distributive strategy is effective in a hierarchy or high power distance

(1998a) and Priutt, (1981) argue that effective negotiation is still can achieve if sufficient information can be collected through the table regardless of differences in power strategies as the power strategies have no direct relationship with joint gains. This is shown when it reported that American and Japanese negotiators have maximised the joint gain. The American negotiators use a lot of direct information exchange and asked numerous questions for open information exchange to identify trade-offs while the Japanese negotiators use indirect information exchange and persuasion with amounts of questions and general information exchange to infer the priority information necessary for trade-offs from the offers (Adair et al., 2004).

Rathus (1973) explained this phenomenon with the element of assertiveness, the ability to express and advocate one’s own needs, interests, and position. By applying Canada and China (Ma and Jagger, 2005), Ma and Jagger (2010) shows that assertiveness is significantly positive correlated with negotiation outcome regardless of the national cultures. Larger share pie can be achieved as they clearly understand that what they want (Mnookin et al.,